The scene may have shifted from the rain-drenched dharna in Islamabad that tickled the priggish nerve in so many but out there in the flooded plains of Punjab the same politics thrives that pits Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz against Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf.

On Tuesday both Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and PTI chief Imran Khan arrived in Sialkot which has been one of the first casualties of the flashfloods. Inevitably, there were comparisons between the incumbent and his only visible challenger.

The prime minister’s tour to Sialkot as well as some other flood-hit areas in the province was characterised by decorum and the usual solemnity. On the other hand, Imran’s visit, undertaken after he thought it necessary to make the diversion from the sit-in in Islamabad, was marked by excitement that a pretender to the throne must generate.

The PTI’s was a good enough show to spark a comment that “the gathering was of industrial workers who had been ordered by their employers to turn up in good numbers to greet Imran”. Away from these factories of Sialkot whose owners now press for some political clout by siding with the alternative in Imran, the PTI will have to ensure that the receptions accorded to its chief are big enough to justify his billing as the real competitor to the Sharifs. The circumstances, however, are not at all non-conducive to the PTI politics.

This is an uneven fight to begin with. The incumbents must be seen to be performing and their latest challenge has come when an opposition campaign to dislodge them has been on for some time. By contrast, Imran has to just stay in hot pursuit of those in power and he has a fair chance of gaining some capital here.

With all the government machinery at their disposal, the prime minister and the chief minister of Punjab are up against the impossible task of simply explaining the flood disaster. Addressing the problem brings its own difficulties. In the presence of television channels trying to outdo each other in bringing the sob stories to their viewers, there have already been a few reported instances highlighting the ceremonial work put in by the administration in honour of the Sharifs that has brought little relief to the affected.

For example, after Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif was through with his familiar monsoon exercise of wading through waters in Hafizabad earlier this week, a television crew returned to the site where a relief camp had been set up. The medicines that had been put on show for the chief ministerial viewing were gone and the degs or cauldrons supposedly there to feed the hungry betrayed no signs of having been used in recent hours. The staff that diligently stood there for the chief minister’s inspection a while back was nowhere in sight. All that remained were the flood-hit people who narrated the latest stories of official neglect.

There is no escape for them from some negative publicity. The deeper the prime minister and the chief minister go into the flood-struck areas, the louder will be the complaints against an inefficient system that they are heading: which is precisely the point the PTI has been trying to make.

A tense situation prevails after the Model Town incident where the chief minister and the prime minister were accused of direct involvement in the killing of Pakistan Awami Tehreek followers. The criticism is that was a serious outcome of a policy where one person or one family concentrates powers in their hands and that the allegations would have been easier to refute had there been proper delegation of authority to the levels where it should actually belong. If Model Town was a jolt to Shahbaz Sharif’s reputation as an administrator, it is too recent an occurrence to not haunt the chief minister in his expeditions to the flood-hit areas of the province.

So large is the scale of the damage that there will be more than a few with genuine complaints which will have far greater resonance in today’s Pakistan, courtesy of the media and the PTI-PAT protest movement. This is not a question of how things should be but of how things are. The good words the prime minister and the chief minister are saying at these outings are so quickly drowned by the cries of anguish that emerge as soon as they depart.

Qamar Javed, a Hafizabad-based lawyer, insists that the visits by the chief minister and the prime minister are of little value to the people. “This could actually backfire since their daily intervention brings out the lack of system most starkly,” he says, just as some others point out how dangerous it is for the visiting Sharifs to appear to be siding with the PML-N lawmakers from the areas whereas the time demands unqualified neutrality.

A case in point is Jhang, threatened with the worst flood in recent history. There are reports the flood mitigation plan in the district was influenced by the preferences of the PML-N members of the National Assembly from the area. That there were apparent changes in the plan after Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s visit there on Tuesday add substance to the reports.

Syeda Abida Husain, who has represented a Jhang constituency for many terms in the National Assembly, has no doubt that the decision on diversionary course was shaped by the opinions of two MNAs belonging to the PML-N, which “exposed densely populated areas of Jhang to floodwaters.” “These are decisions which are best left to the administration,” she tells Dawn.

These are the old realities that the individuals heading the government must keep in mind, at the same time staying mindful of their chasers’ ability to exploit the situation to their advantage. Imran Khan has no such baggage and his advance is helped in no small measure by the fact that the initial deluge inundated parts of Punjab which had a large number of constituencies where the PTI has been saying it was wronged in the 2013 general election.

Sialkot and Hafizabad, where the PTI won a by-election on a provincial assembly seat recently, have been hit hard and both have been high on the PTI list of places where, according to it, elections were rigged. Lahore, which has also been the focus of the PTI’s rigging refrain, has had its own rain-related issues to contend with.

It is these contested districts that lie at the heart of the conflict between the PML-N and the PTI, and it is here that the politics of flood is going to be played out with all its complicated dimensions. This is an opportunity for both the PTI and the PML-N, but perhaps the Sharif camp could have wished for more peaceful times to deal with a problem as huge as these floods.

Published in Dawn, September 11th, 2014